[pygccxml-development] Properties vs methods

[Matthias B. <ba...@ir...>]

Hi,

I just noticed a disadvantage of using attributes (properties) instead 
of method calls for things like decorating declarations. The problem is 
that things like typos in the source code do not get noticed because 
this will just attach a new attribute to the declaration instead of 
producing an error. A line like

   m.callpolicies = return_self()

looks as if it would assign a policy to a method m, but it doesn't 
because the attribute is misspelled. This error is quite hard to find.
A method call on the other hand results in an attribute lookup which 
raises an exception when the attribute doesn't exist (or when it's not 
callable).

- Matthias -